A Muslim intellectual has achieved star status in French-speaking
Europe. He draws crowds of young immigrants and speaks to them with
charismatic fervor. He enchants the anti-globalization left and the
readers of "Le Monde Diplomatique." He cites with equal
mastery the Koran and Nietzsche, Heidegger and the sayings of the
Prophet. He is admired by Fr. Michel Lelong, the leading Islam's
scholar of the Church in France. He sells thousands of cassette
recordings of his sermons. His name is Tariq Ramadan.

Ramadan lives in Geneva, where he was born 42 years ago. He studied as
imam in Cairo and, back in Switzerland, took an undergraduate degree
in French literature and two doctorates, in Islamic studies and the
philosophical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. He teaches at the
universities of Geneva and Fribourg and has for years taken his
students into Third World countries to get field experience and meet
Catholic exponents of Liberation Theology and the Dalai Lama. Since
1993, he has dedicated himself with growing intensity to preaching in
Switzerland, France, and Belgium, with frequent engagements in the
United States. He is the author of over a dozen books: the one
entitled "To Be a European Muslim," published in 1999, has been
translated into 14 languages. He is listened to as an expert at the
European Parliament. He is married, with four children.

In recent months he has been accused of anti-Semitism. He has had
harsh confrontations with influential Jewish intellectuals such as
Bernard-Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, and Bernard Kouchner. "Le
Monde" and other important newspapers have published critical
reviews about him. But for Ramadan, this is all proof of the rightness
of his position and of the West's innate hostility toward Islam.

The phenomenon of Tariq Ramadan wasn't born in a vacuum. His maternal
grandfather, an Egyptian, is Hassan Al-Banna, who in 1929 founded the
Muslim Brotherhood, the most important Islamist movement of the
twentieth century. His father, an exile in Geneva, was one of its most
active promoters. And his brother Hani - with whom Tariq denies having
connections - directs, also in Geneva, an Islamic center accused of
contact with the terrorist network of Al-Qaeda.

But his ideological allegiances are more important than his ancestry.
Tariq Ramadan - working within the very heart of the West - weaves
together Islamic politics and the radical criticisms of Western
rationalism made by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cioran, Guenon, and
neo-Marxist and anti-global currents.

Other twentieth-century Muslim intellectuals went down this road ahead
of him, frequently studying in European universities. One of these is
the Indian Muhammed Iqbal, another the Iranian Ahmad Fardid. One of
the latter's important followers, Djalal Al-e Ahmad, published in
Tehran in 1962 an essay that, as implied by the title of the French
translation, "L'occidentalite," locates Islam's deadly
malady in the West, against the backdrop of an apocalyptic and
nihilistic vision that seems to presage the emergence of the
universalist radical terrorism of an Osama bin Laden.

But a path even more similar to that of Tariq Ramadan is that of
another Egyptian, Hassan Hanafi. He too frequented the Muslim
Brotherhood; he too studied the European philosophers; he too traveled
between Cairo and Paris, where he spent ten years at the Sorbonne; he
too visited and investigated the United States. As the dean of the
philosophy department at the University of Cairo, he clashed with the
ulema of Al-Azhar, who did not share his radicalism.

And for Hanafi, the absolute enemy of Islam is the West. Sometimes it
is dominated, as during the first seven centuries after Mohammed, the
period of Muslim world supremacy; sometimes it is dominant, as during
the following seven centuries. But for him the 21st century is the
century of the reversal, and the beginning of another period of seven
centuries in which the roles will be inverted again: "The West
will begin its new decline, and the Arab-Islamic world, its renewal."

Tariq Ramadan also sees the West in decline. And into the spiritual
void left by Judaism and Christianity, Islam can enter and overcome,
no longer enduring modernity, but islamicizing it. The Western public
likes Ramadan because his vision includes elements of democracy, equal
citizenship, and free expression. He debates both secularized Muslims
and those who separate themselves in closed communities. He announces
the birth of a fully European Islam. And he ventures on this long
journey armed with the doctrine of the taqiyya, or the art of
dissimulation, a typical Islamic practice on enemy soil.

In Italy, the most acute analysis of this anti-Western soul from a
Muslim point of view is found in the book "Global Islam" by Khaled
Fouad Allam, an Algerian, professor of Islamic studies at the
universities of Trieste and Urbino.

In the Christian camp, one critical voice raised against Tariq Ramadan
is that of Olivier Clement, an Orthodox theologian and intellectual
who lives in Paris. What follows is a part of an article that Clement
published in the December, 2003 edition of "Vita e
Pensiero," the magazine of the Catholic University of Milan:

Olivier Clement: Be careful of Ramadan's model of
Islam

The question of school girls wearing veils in France and the debate
about the crucifix in an Italian school room are, in spite of
appearances, strictly connected, and pose the problem of the behavior
of Muslims in these two countries. [...]

We must emphasize immediately that the two cases, French and Italian,
are provocations launched by intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals
recently converted to Islam. [...] They are thus exceptions, but they
were provoked intentionally and are doubtless revealing.

In France, the two sisters expelled from school, not only because of
the veil but more generally for their way of dressing and their
behavior, are the daughters of an agnostic lawyer of a Jewish
background, named Levy. He was the one who encouraged them, to
demonstrate the intolerance of our society.

In Italy, the father of the two children who said he was scandalized
by the crucifix hung on the wall of their school is named Adel Smith,
and converted to Islam in 1982. [...]

These isolated provocations seem to me clear testimonies of a new
course within the ideological motivations of the Muslim communities.
There have certainly always been in France, and there still are,
fundamentalist currents of complete hatred and refusal toward Western
culture. But these instances from other times have never been able to
demolish or even exploit the juridical and mental structures of our
society.

The new ideology is now well defined. Its spokesman, at least in
France and all of Western Europe, is Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan does not
hide himself or devise conspiracies. While affirming his Muslim faith,
he presents himself as a great Western intellectual. Young and
handsome, he speaks with mastery and clarity the language of the
intelligentsia of Western Europe. He teaches philosophy, French
literature, and Islamic studies at the University of Geneva. At the
same time, he works for Muslim groups like "Young Muslims of
France," and has assured himself of a role as an expert among the
commissions that revolve around the European parliament. His media
presence does not cease growing. He is author of more than a dozen
works, including "Les musulmans dans la laicite," "Aux
sources du renouveau musulman," and "Les musulmans
d'occident et l'avenir de l'islam." He is a frequent guest on
television and radio, and he circulates pamphlets in French or Arabic
among young Muslims.

He proposes a "reformist" and "all-encompassing"
Islam. His aim would seem to be that of bringing forth a body of
values beginning from Islamic sources, an embodiment of the universal
vocation that would take the place of the values of Western
civilization. What matters to him is affirming Muslim identity and
presenting it as the source of true universality.

Beginning from the statement that the fulcrum of historical movement
is now constituted by the Europe-North America combination, with the
Muslim countries relegated to the periphery, Ramadan notes how there
are nonetheless many Muslims, especially intellectuals, who have
succeeded in becoming part of the nucleus. He thus invites them to
refashion it and, little by little, islamicize it: "References to
Judaism and Christianity are being diluted, if not disappearing
altogether" ("Les musulmans d'occident e l'avenir de
l'islam," Actes Sud-Sinbad, 2003). "Only Islam can achieve
the synthesis between Christianity and humanism, and fill the
spiritual void that afflicts the West" ("Islam, le face -
face des civilisations," Tawhid, 2001).

And again: "The Koran confirms, completes, and corrects the
messages that preceded it" ("Les messages musulmans d'occident").
Some Christian personalities whose charitable works cannot be
misconstrued - Mother Teresa, Sister Emanuelle, Abbe Pierre, Fr.
Helder Camara - are exceptions who show only that all good people are
implicitly Muslims, because true humanism is founded in Koranic
revelation. Thus, both directly and through this humanism, the "Muslim
City" can be founded upon the earth. "Today the Muslims who live in
the West must unite themselves to the revolution of the
antiestablishment groups from the moment when the neoliberal
capitalist system becomes, for Islam, a theater of war [...] The
revelation of the Koran is explicit: whoever engages in speculation or
cultivates financial interests enters into war against the
transcendent" ("Pouvoirs," 2003, n. 164).

Tariq Ramadan then insists - justly - on the long-neglected
intellectual riches of the great Muslim thinkers like Al-Kindi,
Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, but he forgets to situate them in
their relation to Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought, and presents
them as the true originators of humanism.

Jacques Jomier has efficiently summed up the goal that drives Tariq
Ramadan: "His problem is not the modernization of Islam, but the
islamification of modernity" ("Esprit et Vie," February
17, 2000). We must not forget that Ramadan is the nephew of Hassan
Al-Banna, the founder of the Islamic movement of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, a man Ramadan considers an eminent
representative of "reformist" Islam, capable of bringing
about an endogenous alternative culture from within modernity
("Peut-on vivre avec l'islam?", Favre, 1990).

In his opinion, all forms of contrast must be avoided: around 1995,
Ramadan praised Hassan Al-Turabi's activities in Sudan. He's not like
that anymore (but his brother Hani, who finances the publishing house
Tawhid, doesn't share his reservations, particularly regarding the
trials and sentences against adulterous women in Nigeria). Tariq
Ramadan prefers to appeal to the freedom of conscience guided by the
judgment imparted by Koranic revelation. "Some Muslim scholars, using
arguments taken from the Koran and the Sunna, have prohibited music
and even drawing and photography (and thus television and cinema). It
is one opinion among many, and as such it must be respected [...]. But
others, like ourselves, should determine a selective approach in these
matters, as in others" ("Les musulmans d'occident e l'avenir de
l'islam"). The same can be said about the veil: we must leave this
choice to women, while revealing to them its true significance.

What can be done in the face of this new situation? [...] In France,
where the Muslim community is very numerous and the debates rage on
both the right and the left, the parliament is close to voting on a
law that would ban the display of religious signs in school buildings.
This prospect disturbs the Catholics, according to whom this sort of
law would seem to the Muslims like a form of stigmatization and
rejection on the part of the national community. [...] But it seems
that the more intelligent Muslims are secretly hoping for a law that
would favor this exclusion, which would be open proof of the innate
islamophobia of French society. [...] Tariq Ramadan's thought confers
an unexpected scope upon the current provocations. For our part, we
are called to a more profound and lucid Christianity, one able, at the
same time, to both welcome and illuminate everything.

Al-Turabi was also close to the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth. He
studied philosophy in Europe, at the Sorbonne in Paris. He speaks a
language very familiar to European culture. He sees in the West a
post-Christian society, and in Islam the fulfillment of Christianity.
He says he is a supporter of religious dialogue.

But throughout the 1990's Al Turabi was much more than an
intellectual. He was the eminence grise of the military rulers in
Sudan. He tried to create a new Islamic state that would be a model
for the entire Muslim world. He hosted Osama bin Laden and was the
mentor of Al-Qaeda's strategist, the Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Until
his fall from grace with the military regime in 2000, he was the
Islamic ideologue most seen on the Al-Jazeera television channel.

In 1994, he managed to be received in a private audience by an
unsuspecting John Paul II, in the Vatican.

There was a long interview with Al-Turabi conducted in 1994 by
Muriel Mirak-Weissbach for Lyndon LaRouche's "Executive
Intelligence Review." Entitled "Sudanese leaders deal
with the issues," it is archived at
http://www.aboutsudan.com/interviews/hassan_al_turbi.htm. [Ed
note: Al-Turbi glided over the interviewer's question whether there
is religious discrimination in the Sudan. There is none for him, a
Muslim. He was not asked about slavery, which is endemic in Sudan.]

Note 2. On Giacomo Cardinal Biffi

The alarm for an islamicization of Europe, that Olivier Clement
attributes to Tariq Ramadan, has much in common with what Giacomo
Cardinal Biffi, the archbishop of Bologna, said at the conclusion of
one of his famous - and debated - conferences, on September 30, 2000.
Here are the last three paragraphs:

"In an interview about ten years ago, I was asked candidly and
with enviable optimism: 'Do you also hold that Europe will either be
Christian or not be?' It seems to me that the reply I made then is
well suited to the conclusion of my statements today.

"I think - I said then - that Europe will either become Christian
again or become Muslim. What seems to me to be without a future is the
'culture of nothing', of freedom without limits or content, of
scepticism hailed as an intellectual conquest, which seems to be the
attitude mainly dominant among the European peoples, more or less rich
in means and poor in truth. This 'culture of nothing' (supported by
hedonism and libertine insatiability) will not be able to bear the
ideological assault of Islam, which will not be lacking. Only the
rediscovery of the Christian drama as the only salvation for man - and
thus only a decisive resurrection of the ancient spirit of Europe -
can offer a different outcome to this inevitable confrontation.

"Unfortunately, neither the secularists nor the Catholics seem
to be aware of the drama that is approaching. The secularists,
hammering at the Church in every way possible, do not realize that
they are fighting the strongest source of inspiration and the most
valid defense of Western civilization and its values of rationality
and freedom: perhaps they will realize it too late. The Catholics,
allowing their awareness of the truth they possess to fade and
substituting for apostolic zeal pure and simple dialogue at any cost,
are unknowingly preparing (humanly speaking) their own extinction. The
hope is that the gravity of the situation can, at some moment, bring
about an effective reawakening of both reason and the ancient
faith."

A writeup of Cardinal Biffi's September 2000 conference can be found
on http://213.92.16.98/ESW_articolo/0,2393,4851,00.html It is entitled
"Giacomo Biffi: Sull'immigrazione."

Note 3.
Oliver Clement's article was taken from the magazine of the Catholic
University of Milan. It is called "Vita e Pensiero"; its website
address is http://www.vitaepensiero.it/riviste/pagcoml/vep.asp?titolo=
=VITA%20E%20PENSIERO

Note 4. Tariq Ramadan's website address is
http://tariq-ramadan.net

In Italy, an interview by Nina zu Furstenberg with Tariq Ramadan was
published in edition number 78, July-August, 2003, of the magazine
Reset headed by Giancarlo Bosetti. Reset's website
address
is http://www.reset.il

Note 5.
This book is indispensable for understanding the antithesis between
Islam and the West according to the greatest Muslim intellectuals of
the twentieth century:
Khaled Fouad Allam, L'islam globale, Rizzoli, Milan, 2002,
pp. 210, 16,00 euros.

Note 6. The Ismaili Shiites are an international
Muslim movement that maintains more positive relations with the West.
Sandro Magister's article on Aga Khan, the imam of the Shia Ismaili
Muslims - "The Other Islam. The Peaceful Revolution of the
Ismaili Shiites" - appeared on www.chiesa March 11, 2003.

This article appeared on the bilingual Italian website, www.chiesa. It
was written by Sandro Magister in Italian and translated into English
by Matthew Sherry. The article includes an independent article by
Olivier Clement and several notes, giving several opinions about the
relationship of Islam and the West. It is archived at
http://213.92.16.98/ESW_articolo/0,2393,42025,00.html

Thanks are due Cummunaute-Juive-France (the French Jewish Community),
for bringing this article to our attention. Their website is
http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/Communaute-Juive-France/ To become a
subscriber, write: Cummunaute-Juive-France-d@yahoogroupes.fr